They tied his hands in front of him.

  That offended Dennis more than the rest of it.

  The impossible road, the foreign stars, the hunting dogs, the armed horsemen—those were too large for his mind to grip all at once. But the rope around his wrists was immediate. Practical. Humiliating.

  He had spent years being careful. Careful with money. Careful with paperwork. Careful with the words he used at work and at home, because one wrong sentence in the wrong room could make the next month harder than it already was.

  Now a stranger with scarred knuckles was knotting coarse rope around his wrists as if Dennis were a thief pulled from a market crowd.

  The knot bit when he flexed.

  “Too tight,” Dennis said.

  The man ignored him.

  The leader swung back into his saddle and jerked his chin toward the road. One of the riders hauled Dennis upright and shoved him forward.

  The dogs stayed close.

  Dennis cast a quick look at the forest behind them. No door. No office corridor. No buzzing fluorescent lights. Only pines, stone, mist, and a road that looked as though it had been old when his own city was young.

  The leader rode beside him as they moved. “Walk.”

  Dennis walked.

  His shoulder throbbed. His knee hurt where he had hit the ground. Wet leaves clung to the hem of his trousers. He felt absurdly underdressed, as if the universe had expected him to arrive in armor and had found him laughably unprepared in work shoes and a dark jacket from a department store sale.

  The riders spoke among themselves in that same harsh language. Every now and then one of them looked back at Dennis and muttered something with the careful disgust people reserved for roadkill.

  One did not.

  The youngest of them—little more than a boy, really, with wind-reddened cheeks and a patchy beard he was probably proud of—kept glancing over with uncertainty instead of contempt. He had the look of someone not yet old enough to hide his thoughts.

  Dennis filed that away.

  You survived difficult people by learning who was cruel, who was weak, and who still had a conscience they had not yet trained into silence.

  After a time, the leader spoke again in his broken English.

  “From where do you come?”

  Dennis let out a thin breath. “You won’t believe me.”

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  “Try.”

  He almost laughed. Not because it was funny. Because the alternative was panic. “I was in a building. In a city. I opened a door. Then I was here.”

  The leader’s mouth flattened. “A tale for drunk priests.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  The young rider said something quietly. The leader barked a response that shut him up.

  Dennis kept his eyes on the road. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Red Hollow.”

  “That means nothing to me.”

  “It means,” the leader said, “you live if the reeve believes your face.”

  Dennis frowned. “And if he doesn’t?”

  The leader did not answer.

  That was answer enough.

  The road dipped into a low stretch where mist pooled thick above black water. The horses snorted and stamped. Somewhere far off, an owl called once.

  Dennis tried again. “You called me Nameless.”

  The leader looked at him sidelong. “You carry no clan-thread. No market cut. No guard brand. No god-sign. No road token. No iron. No pack. No papers. No proper boots.” He grunted. “No sense.”

  Dennis almost said, Welcome to my evening.

  Instead he said, “Maybe I’m just lost.”

  The leader’s scar pulled white as he smiled without humor. “Men get lost. Names do not.”

  Before Dennis could ask what that meant, one of the dogs stiffened.

  The animal’s head turned toward the trees ahead. A low growl rolled out of its chest.

  All five riders reacted at once.

  Spears lifted. Reins tightened. The young rider swore.

  Dennis peered into the darkness and saw only trunks and brush.

  Then he heard it.

  Crying.

  Thin. High. Human.

  A child.

  The sound came from off the road to the right, from a tangle of hazel and briar where moonlight fell in narrow stripes. It cut through the night and vanished, then came again—small and terrified.

  Dennis stopped without thinking.

  The rider holding his rope jerked hard enough to nearly pull him off balance. “Move.”

  “There’s a kid in there.”

  The leader held up a hand. The group went still.

  The crying came once more.

  The young rider swallowed. “Sir—”

  The leader silenced him with a look. He listened for three heartbeats, then spat into the mud. “Bait.”

  Dennis stared. “What?”

  “Fen-witch trick. Bandit trick. Wolf trick. I do not care which. We keep road.”

  The child cried again.

  This time there was no mistaking the fear in it.

  Dennis looked from the dark brush to the riders and felt something harden inside him.

  Maybe it was fatherhood. Maybe it was faith. Maybe it was just the simple fact that some choices came before fear had time to speak.

  “That’s a child,” he said.

  The leader’s horse shifted impatiently. “That is none of your death to die.”

  Dennis stepped toward the sound.

  The rope snapped tight.

  Three dogs surged forward with snarling excitement. One rider cursed and nearly lost his spear. The young one said, “Sir, let me—”

  “No.”

  Dennis turned his head. “You can’t just leave—”

  The flat of a spear struck him across the ribs.

  Pain exploded through his side. He stumbled to one knee, breath gone in a hot flash. The dogs barked wildly above him.

  And then something burned.

  Not in his ribs.

  In his left wrist.

  Dennis gasped and looked down.

  Under the rope, beneath mud and sleeve and skin, a thin line of white-gold light had kindled like a coal touched by breath. It flashed once in a shape too quick to understand—curved lines crossing like a lantern frame—and then bit deeper, hot enough to make his whole hand shake.

  He heard the leader say, very clearly this time, “No child lives in that brush.”

  The mark on Dennis’s wrist blazed.

  A pulse of pain shot up his arm.

  And he knew, with the same impossible certainty by which he had known the door mattered, that the man had just lied.

  Not guessed.

  Not been cruel.

  Lied.

  Dennis looked up slowly.

  The leader saw his face change.

  Saw the light under the rope.

  For the first time since the capture, the scarred man’s composure cracked.

  “Hold him,” he snapped.

  Too late.

  The brush to the right erupted.

  Not with wolves.

  With a little girl in a filthy brown shift, no older than eight, stumbling out of the thorns with blood on one shin and terror on her face as something huge moved behind her in the dark.